Upstream projects that do not comply with their license (MIT/EPL/...)

[Wolodja Wentland]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 12:06 +1000, Eugenio Cano-Manuel Mendoza wrote:
> My bad on licensing debian/* with GPL on quoin, for the rest of the packages
> I've used EPL-1.0, I must have forgotten to change it back.

That's fine and one reason why packages are being reviewed by a third party.

> For the other issue: Should we package the license along with the code in
> the mean time? or should we wait for upstream to fix it? (hoping that they
> fix it).

It would, naturally, be a good idea to wait for upstream to fix these bugs and
release a new version that includes the fix. Some even did so already, but I
have the feeling that we have to wait a long time for other projects.

That being said: I am not sure/convinced that we are allowed to actually ship
the license ourselves. One might argue that by not complying with the license
in the first place the code is *currently* not being made available to us
under that license (which also means that we cannot make changes that comply
with the license).

OTOH the *intention* of upstream is pretty clear and I am sure they won't take
us to court over this, but I wouldn't want to rely on that.

All the above IANAL and IMHO. Other thoughts?

The underlying problem for this is that "lein new" does not include a proper
LICENSE file in its template and a lot of upstream authors^Whipster-kiddies
simply don't care about licensing and other conventions that were (?) common
place in open source communities not too long ago. I'll talk this over with
Phil and will, hopefully, get this fix into the next leiningen release.
-- 
Wolodja <debian at babilen5.org>

4096R/CAF14EFC
081C B7CD FF04 2BA9 94EA  36B2 8B7F 7D30 CAF1 4EFC
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-clojure-maintainers/attachments/20130730/2ad95016/attachment.sig>